A new take on an old favorite: Lasagna

Last week, Brent and I tried two recipes that tingled our tastebuds and left us eager to experiment.

First, Health-Bent’s Paleo Butternut Squash Lasagna. We used our homemade sausage and it was OMG delicious. And it was beautiful too. 🙂 We gobbled it up in just a few meals, and it left us craving more. Thank you Health-Bent.com!!!

Second, we tried to follow a new spaghetti recipe, one that broke the typical Paleo mold of using spaghetti squash. Enter, PaSketti: Sweet Potato Spaghetti. Brent recently found the Paleo Parents’ website and I’ve been a little obsessed lately. 🙂 They are an inspiration. Seriously, a family with three growing boys successfully living a Paleo lifestyle?! I had wondered if it were possible, and it seems it is. I think I might actually be coming over the side of full-time Paleo for the rest of my life… maybe… almost. Brent is probably there; but I’m not totally sold on giving up cake forever just yet.

Anyways, back to the PaSketti: The white shredded sweet potato–the Giant was oddly out of regular sweet potatoes–looked a lot more like Spaetzle and got me really craving a good, ol’ fashioned Schnitzel with Spaetzle (yep, my family is German). So sometime this week or next, I might toy around with that idea.

Meanwhile, I made my own tomato sauce for the PaSketti, but I misjudged how much I needed and ultimately the entire dish turned out to be more like a brown-greyish mush. BUT IT WAS DELICIOUS. I mean, wow! Salty, savory, beefy… and there was a slight gravy-like quality to it. Brent and I couldn’t get enough, and it was gone way faster than we expected… portion control? Sometimes we’re not so good at that, haha.

Fast forward to this past Saturday when we were making our weekly grocery list. The amazing flavors of the Health-Bent lasagna and Paleo Parents PaSketti still lingering in our memories. Brent had an idea: why not add shredded sweet potato to the lasagna? Then, we thought, why not just use the sweet potato instead of the butternut squash? Also, we were all out of our homemade sausage; but, lasagna often uses ground beef. We had plenty of that in the freezer. So, out it came.

Sunday, after completing our shopping on Saturday and having defrosted the ground beef (and some other things I’ll mention in another post) overnight, we dove into cooking.

To make the lasagna, we started with shredding the sweet potato with our crazy food processor.

I also roasted a lot of tomatoes (12 to be exact–I had to do it in two batches) at 400 degrees F for 25 minutes.

Borrowing from the PaSketti recipe, we sautéed our 2 pounds of ground beef with 1 medium onion, 3 celery stalks and four or five cloves of garlic. (Note: Looking back, we wish we’d added more; perhaps a little kick from red pepper flakes, extra garlic and onion, or even just some salt and pepper to this mix.)

After the tomatoes were roasted, I simmered them on medium-low to cook them down a little further. Brent added a healthy dose of “pizza seasoning” (a mix of oregano, garlic, crushed red pepper, etc.).

Meanwhile, we preheated the oven to 400 degrees F.

Once all the parts were ready, we began the layering process. Sauce, ground beef mix, shredded white sweet potato, repeat.

We finished it off with sauce on top. (We actually used all the ground beef mix and most of the sauce, but because we shredded three large sweet potatoes, we still have a lot of that left over.) We covered it with the corning wear’s glass top and placed it in the oven for 35 minutes.

Our first plates didn’t look to pretty, so I took a picture of the dish instead with our first pieces cut out. It’s not the most stable of layered lasagnas; and, again, it could have used some more spices. We like our food to bite back a little 😉 But for an experiment, I think it turned out rather well.

And if my word isn’t good enough for you, just know that we have plowed through almost this entire corning wear dish in less than 24 hours. There’s honestly only one large piece (or two small pieces… ha, right) left of this goodness.